Colour Television (Part 2)

 

It was a bizarre period. More and more hip-hop artists started to enter the movie and TV industries.

And the next step was this:

I guess it's now time to meet the Olympic Committee of just say no.

Going for a Kool-Aid Acid Test in the mid-1960s.

Conference given by Jack Kerouac at the Kaye Playhouse, Hunter College, New York City, on November 6, 1958. The event was sponsored by Brandeis University.

I knew about this film since the mid-1990s, when I started reading the Beats. But it's only since using youtube at some point between 2019 or 2020 that I finally saw it for the first time.

Look at the woman in the thumbnail. That's Delphine Seyrig.

Jack Kerouac interview from The Ben Hecht Show, New York City in October 1958.

The first Coen brothers movie I've seen was this one, when I was a teen.  Another French dubbed version broadcasted on Télé-Québec. And another one I finally saw in its original version during the pandemic.

What if instead of being inspired by William Faulkner, the character constantly looking for his honey was inspired by Ben Hecht?

Just find out about who was Ben Hecht and you'll see why I think that. 

Perhaps the entirety of that Barton Fink movie could be Ben Hecht.

It's always been difficult for me to consider the movies Barton Fink and Naked Lunch as anything else but complementary pieces.

 

About that Hecht's novel A Jew in Love and the discourse of sexuality, there's this film featuring Tuli Kupferberg (The Fugs).

I pretty much enjoyed the recent Queer.

By the way, Brian De Palma dedicated his legendary movie to Ben Hecht.

Not only are all the values and principles these rappers highlight skewed by the character Tony Montana throughout the movie and perfect examples of what is being designated whenever the concept of toxic masculity comes up (and one of the many components actually exposed and criticized by the movie itself), what each and everyone of those rappers missed is that Tony didn't make that much on his own, per se. At the very beginning of the movie, the first requirement he had to fullfil to even be allowed passage into the United States is that a drug dealer will arrange for the obtainment of his green card on the express condition that Tony kills a fleeing former Fidel Castro henchman for him. If you need me to spell it out for you: Tony's big ascension was due to people using him and a whole system making him crave for it.

If instead you feel like reading something about the origins of American thoughts, I invite you to get the following 1927 book by Vernon Louis Parrington. It's a simple download link uniting the three volumes in one pdf file. 

Volume One 1620-1800
The Colonial Mind

Volume Two 1800-1860
The Romantic Revolution in America

Volume Three 1860-1920
The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America

You read right here:

This was suggested to me by a Harold Rosenberg interview.

MR. CUMMINGS: What kind of cultural life was there? Did you get involved?

MR. ROSENBERG: In Seattle?

MR. CUMMINGS: Yeah.

MR. ROSENBERG: There was a very interesting cultural life centering around the University of Washington, which was Vernon Louis Parrington's university, you remember. You probably don't remember Parrington. He was dead then, but Parrington was the great historian of America's literature. He wrote a book called Main Currents in American Thought, which everybody grew up on in the thirties. Parrington is a kind of follower of Beard, I think, you know, sort of materialistic historian, interpreted literature on the basis of social and economic development. And his book was a kind of classic in the thirties. It seems to have been completely forgotten by this time. He was teacher at the University of Washington and had quite a number of disciples who were there when we got there. There were several very good anthropologists who had made studies of the West Coast Indians. There were some good historians. There was a famous historian who had been in and out of the University of Washington that had a great influence. There was a good drama group. A fellow named Savage, who was. . . . I think it's Savage, a big husky guy who won a prize for a play in New York at that time. And they had a theater out on a boat.

MR. CUMMINGS: Oh, really.

MR. ROSENBERG: And they had a lot of play readings. In fact, it was a quite lively place. 

The entire text is right here.

Okay, relax Donald. Here, Chief... Have a Juicy Fruit.

Meet the bastard who invented the lobotomy. Our guest is that poor City Council Member who lost to a Jell-O chocolate flavored pudding cup.

Watch the documentary by clicking right here.

Hopefully you recognize the landmark. This is from a Bernie Worrell posthumous album which came out last year. The song features Cibo Matto's Miho Hatori. An album full of surprises.

That music video was directed by Madaline Riley whom perhaps you saw in I Saw the TV Glow. If not, you should. It's obviously starring Jada and Will Smith's son Justice and of course I immediately thought about my friend Jasa Baka's Smile Stealers.

Are you ready for more? The whole band was fully on LSD throughout (including Bernie).

In this next video, by revisiting 50 years later some of the same landmarks as seen in the video above, Tonysha Nelson and Patavian Lewis decided to pay homage to their grandfather George Clinton. 

The Free Jazz Loft Scene era of the 1970s in New York City.

The trumpet and cornet player Olu Dara (the father of the rapper Nas) was part of that scene.

What can be said, I just...

Or as Ted Joans used to say, "Jazz is my religion, and surrealism is my point of view."

 

Yes, 1959.

James Brandon Lewis and his accomplices...

(We will remember Luke Stewart from the Sound American discussion around Sun Ra)

... has dedicated this album to Ornette Coleman & Charlie Haden, but also to surrealism.

In terms of contemporary music, la musique spectrale is my favorite style. So if you enjoyed that Eye Scream Man from Spectralmotion...

Just watch Belinda give her own arrangements based on a Tristan Murail composition.

Have you heard about the 1969 Amougies Festival? This festival was held in a small commune of more or less 970 inhabitants in Belgium That was when Frank Zappa famously joined Pink Floyd on stage to play Interstellar Overdrive.

The following video is a patchwork of various sources. Nothing from this festival has ever been officially commercialized, but plenty has been circulating via internet and bootleggers. I've read comments left by Jérôme Laperrousaz of how disinterested he was to start messing with all the copyrights holders over producing a DVD of his Power Music documentary. 

When Belinda moved out in 2007, now equiped with a computer and an internet access, the first torrent I ever downloaded was the set Soft Machine had played there.

Set up by the record label BYG, the Amougies festival wasn't alone. As part of the activities was also the counter-cultural underground magazine Actuel. Not only was that Full Moon Ensemble affiliated, when Jean Georgakarako left for New York City, he started another interesting record label.

Thanks to the magnificient label Strut Records for giving us the story.

So many musicians worked in Material over the years. Olu Dara is back on trumpet right here.

A sister formation is Praxis. Buckethead, Bootsy, Laswell and Bernie with Brain (the drummer of the band Primus, with Les Claypool).

I guess you now need to meet RAMMELLZEE. 

Hopefully this helped and you can now enter some of the secret chambers of the Wu-Tang Clan maze. Do you remember that the RZA had a small role in Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. As a 5 Percenter, the Samurai in Camouflage (RZA) met Ghost Dog just before his final act.

Another Brainfeeder classic.

And again, with his cousin GZA... and Bill Murray, in this must from Jim Jarmusch. There's other vignettes with Spike Lee's brother Cinqué and sister Joie (and Steve Buscemi) and my favorites really have to be between Tom Waits and Iggy Pop, between Isaach de Bankolé and Alex Descas, and the one between Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan is just too special. Watch the whole thing if you don't know, and perhaps also seek out Wayne Wang/Paul Auster's complementary pieces Smoke and Blue in the Face.

If you are wondering, they were talking about this movie:

Also, who doesn't love Steven Wright?

And suppose I was to not mention the fucking New York Gong?

Recorded at the Bananamoon Observatory Studio, Willow, New York in 1979

Daevid Allen – vocals, guitar, glissando guitar

Cliff Cultreri – guitar

Bill Laswell – bass

Fred Maher – drums

Bill Bacon – drums

Additional personnel

Michael Beinhorn – synthesizer

Don Davis – alto saxophone

Gary Windo – tenor saxophone

Mark Kramer – organ

Here in a special remastering done by none other than Weasel Walter.

No Wave Cinema, then.

It's not rockit science.

Bill Laswell also did some production for Fela, adding Bernie and the percussionist Aïyb Dieng in the mix. Unfortunately, it wasn't to Fela's taste.

Here featuring Umar Bin Hassan of The Last Poets and some more Pharoah Sanders.

Not too surprising? 

We could go for a while, but let's move on.

Oh... Basquiat designed the cover and produced Rammellzee's first record. 

Before we move on, since we are in a good mood. How is your dad when confronted with another man's from-the-other-side-of-the-cockpit's-glass sexual expression?

Is Dad genuinely that much against crawling or was Thundercat's reference too deep for him?

When Creed Taylor stepped down from Impulse Records, he went on to become a producer at Verve Records (the label that would release the Velvet Underground's second album White Light/White Heat, the last album before John Cale's departure).

This 1966 recording is from a Tribute to the Memory of the Marquis de Sade.

Known for his many movies and TV scores as well, Lalo Schifrin died this year in June. 

In the 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism, André Breton wrote:

Le merveilleux est toujours beau, n'importe quel merveilleux est beau, il n'y a même que le merveilleux qui soit beau.

English readers are perhaps accustomed to reading this phrase as:

• The marvelous is always beautiful, any marvelous thing is beautiful, there is even nothing but the marvelous that is beautiful.

But a more accurate translation would be:

The marvelous is always beautiful, whichever marvelous is beautiful, nothing but the marvelous can ever be beautiful.  

If you subscribed to the avant-garde movements as rejections of the past norms of cultural production through innovations, and if you are not entirely cretinous, you should have been able to recognize that especially after Dada, a statement such as André Breton's was never setting any endeavors around aesthetic selection. By orienting a movement based on something as ultimately undefinable like the Marvelous, you were giving it a counter-cultural praxis.

What the fuck was Trump saying about keeping "wokesters" out of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts by self-appointing as its new curator?

The decoy of perception.

A little movie I haven't heard a whole lot about besides nobody really "getting it". Obviously, this movie came out at a time when every "movie reviewer" talked about how Hollywood is falling apart or how "woke" movies are, while others only wanted to talk about how much of a bad and abusive person the director David O. Russell is therefore fuck this movie as a punishment towards him, as any smart people usually do.

Regarding that "nonsense song", it's once again very much that same Tristan Tzara idea for creating personal poems, and the photomontages Margot Robbie's character makes are fully inspired by Dada, which all appeared to me as a quite lovely surprise when I walked in blindly to watch that movie.

Dear Smedley Butler...

Or what if instead of fawning over Scarface and what it represents to you, trapped inside that American capitalist bubble...

When I was in Chicago, I have met some young people hanging around the Surrealist Group. Sadly, I don't remember their names. On the photograph below, the guy dressed in blue next to me got us inside the Museum of Contemporary Art for free by telling the ticket clerks that we just needed to use the restroom.

I ended up discussing Kool Keith with the woman standing on my other side. So here's a little shout out to... you.

Featuring the late Roger Troutman of Zapp, the master of the talk box. 

We definitely need more.

Kool Keith was always something else from the start. I can't pass up this classic. You need to take out your World Encyclopedia to decipher all the topics he's dropping on that track.

I never understood all the hype around Biggie or even around 2Pac, or basically the interest about most of the rap music once Puff Daddy started his label. Well, I do understand it: people say Biggie was a great storyteller while Tupac was authentic and sensitive. That thing was that in 1995, I started listening to other genres of music and started reading. If I have to emphasize the point, I have never listened to any of the so-called rap moguls like Kanye West or Jay-Z, nor to Eminem and all these rappers everybody labeled as GOATs since the turn of the century.

If you are unaware: Being "All About the Benjamins", Benjamin Franklin's face being on the American 100$ bill, the complete statement of the song is that everything being done here is done to get money. As a listener, the eternal question I will ever have about this type of rappers rapping about their wealth is: "Why are you expecting me to give a fuck about this?"

In other rap songs, you might hear the expression "Dead Presidents" and it's about these other faces of deceased presidents from the past on dollar bills, same in most countries (likewise in Canada now that the Queen is dead, the currency hasn't yet changed to display those ears Charles got).

In contrast, the Dead Prez are legit leftist rappers. Here with Fela's son.

And whatever the fuck happened to Kanye's mind to try to become the Republican presidential candidate in 2020...

I have yet to watch this one but that will come.

Like Delphine Seyrig's great-uncle would say, if you mix up the signifier for the signified and enter a lacanian glissement...

... you very well can always want more from Noël Rota in here...

... as he did previously when he was known as Helno. But who the fuck knows how to properly settle a point de capiton these days? In both cases, you should be able to find the punk exuberance.

(Well, Jean-Marie Le Pen died earlier this year.)

More unfamiliar foreign stuff for the Young American Minds to go: "Uh, okayyy..." and awkwardly walk away, further down that bottomless cringe culture they have sunk into, instead of actively paying attention and becoming interested.

Miette as in Hermine de Saussure? Miette as in Delphine's mother?

Stranger things have been seen. As in learning that the grand producer of Krautrock...

... produced Les Rita Mitsouko's first album...

(I saw them in concert during the 2000 edition of the FrancoFolies, and I saw one of my colleagues from Moisson Montréal sitting nearby. He told me that one of his friends had brought back home a porn film he had found by chance, specifically because one of the actresses in it was Catherine Ringer. She did a few in the late 1970s. Despite all of them being gay men, they watched some of film and experienced a mixture of grossed-out kinky shamefulness, because.. well, you know how certain gay men can idolize boundary-pushing female singers such as her... or that whole obsession with divas... It's not always just clichés, you know.)

... and that this classic rap song's music video famously features a young Jermaine Dupri, later to become a producer himself and introduce us to Da Brat (who came out as a lesbian in 2020, by the way... since I was mentioning that type of things) and Kris Kross.

Okay, or how about when I was in Chicago... Penelope Rosemont gave me Fernando Arrabal's email address, which I've only used once. It was to send him my inquiry about "When stepping into darkness, do you feel compel to lower your voice?" without specifying what type of darkness (of course).

Arrabal's reply was basically him playing at being Arrabal, so I gave up on asking him anything further. Drop the persona, gang.

But on coming back to Saint-Hyacinthe, this music video was filmed in my friend's Steve St-Germaine's bookstore. Filmed by Audrey Hébert and her lover Sébastien Gagnon (who also directed it), I became friendish with them for a while whenever I would go to the Zaricot where they work (I believe they now are co-owners, too... in any case, every members of Renard Blanc are or were connected to that venue).

I've asked the drummer, Alexandre Crépeau what was this song about. As its composer, he told me it was inspired by Jodorowsky.

Discussing with Sébastien (the one booking all the live performances at Le Zaricot), I mentioned him that Gab Paquet (whom he has booked many times) is a pataphysician close(ish) to our surrealist friend David Nadeau in Québec, and founder of the Protectorat de 'Pataphysique québéquoise.

Of course, Arrabal is a member of the Collège de 'Pataphysique. After knowing about this movie for years, I've finally watched very recently. Starring the singer Alain Bashung.

(This is courtesy of our friend Steven Cline, member of the Atlanta Surrealist Group. Watch his channel for more Arrabal as well as both Robert Benayoun's movies Paris n'existe pas and Sérieux comme le plaisir.)

Steve is responsable for introducing me to this splendid Alain Bashung album. When Bashung came to perform it in Montréal, Steve spent the night at our apartment (Beli & I) and left me his copy of the CD to listen to while he was attending that concert, insisting I would not regret it. I certainly did not.

In it you can find an interpretation of a poem by Robert Desnos from Corps et biens and it also features musicians such as Marc Ribot and Arto Lindsay (of DNA). Highly remarkable stuff.

Bashung is no longer with us and we also lost D'Angelo in October. Here with Kendra Foster whom we saw elsewhere before in this blog. She co-wrote basically half of the Black Messiah album with him, an album inspired in large part by Fred Hampton.

We are now almost coming to a close. I told you we would have a lot to ground to cover in that Colour Television.

Really? Are you saying that according to you My Boy Lollipop is a gay anthem or something? Fuck you, Rush.

Another shout-out to our friend Bill Howe of the Leeds Surrealist Group.

I need to find that documentary, too.

Don't think Canada is immune.

Now that you have read Parrington's book, I'm sure you will want to complete the journey with this 17-parts series on the History of the American Republican Party.

I'm sure that right about now you would be open for some Words Of Advice For Young People.

This one is from a collaboration between Burroughs and Michael Franti & Rono Tse. Formerly of The Beatnigs, this is the second and final album by the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy before Franti formed his group Spearhead. The album was co-produced by DHoH and Hal Willner. I used to own that CD.

And do I need to add anything?

From the formative library of a teenager Surrealdom.

****

Viewed as natural as trees and grass

Given way of the middle class

A promise to outplay the mass

For all the wealth can be amassed

It's a single story (Story)

Violently imposed as the (Story)

Universal narrative

Of progress and development and of civilisation

The same ones lead, other ones lag

While majority numbers gag

Killing the possibilities

Of there being other stories

Conceptualisations (Other)

Of progress and development (Stories)

Open are the possibilities

A deluding promise of a middle class for old times on